Free A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield, Nicolas Pelham Page B

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Description de l’Égypte
which was the result of their work aroused Europe’s interest in both Pharaonic Egypt and the contemporary world of Islam, which was mysterious and unknown. Orientalism in the West received a wholly new impulse.
    Learned Egyptians, such as Shaikh al-Jabarti, visited the Institut and the printing-press and watched chemical and scientific experiments. Al-Jabarti saw a balloon launched at Cairo’s Ezbekiyah Square. But while the Egyptians were politely curious about these displays of Western technology, their fundamental beliefs were unshaken.
    With regard to its strategic objectives, Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt was a failure. Sultan Selim formed an alliance against him with France’s enemies England and Russia. The destruction of Bonaparte’s fleet in Abukir Bay by Nelson on 1 August 1798 placed his only line of communication with France at their mercy. When he advanced into Syria to forestall a Turkish invasion, he was turned back at Acre and forced into a disastrous retreat. In August 1799 he abandoned Egypt and with a handful of followers slipped back to Paris, where a crucial struggle for power was taking place. His successors in Egypt held on for another two years, facing sporadic insurrections in Cairo and attacks by Anglo-Turkish troops to enforce their withdrawal. Although they successfully repulsed these more than once, their weakening situation finally forced them to capitulate and evacuate Egypt.
    Bonaparte’s invasion was a brief episode in the long history of Egypt, but it had lasting significance. It not only aroused in the West a wave of interest in the Arab/Islamic regions of the Ottoman Empire; it also marked the opening of a prolonged struggle between the powers of Europe for influence and control over these territories. The struggle lasted a century and a half. It primarily involvedEngland and France, but Russia was also concerned with the Middle East region on its southern borders, and in the latter part of the nineteenth century the newly united states of Germany and Italy also began to intervene.
    Britain responded to Bonaparte’s threat to its vital interests by helping the Ottoman sultan to expel the French from Egypt. Anglo-French rivalry also extended to the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. After the outbreak of war between France and England in 1793, France sent various missions to Istanbul and Tehran to try to secure a friendly alliance between Turkey and Persia against Russia, and to revive French influence in Persia. French agents also appeared in the Gulf, studying the movements of British shipping between the Arabian waters and India. French intervention received a wholly new impulse with Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt. Attacks on British merchant shipping were stepped up by French war vessels and privateers based in Mauritius. A ‘Napoleonic era’ in the region lasted until the French were expelled from Mauritius in 1810.
    The first British reaction to Bonaparte’s arrival in Egypt was the East India Company’s signature of a treaty with the sultan of Muscat. In the 1820s, similar treaties were signed with other local rulers along the Gulf coast. These treaties developed into annually negotiated truces through which Britain endeavoured to establish a Pax Britannica over the waters of the Gulf. At this stage British ambitions in the region were maritime/commercial rather than imperial. There was still no question of challenging the authority either of the Ottoman and Persian empires or of the independent Arab rulers who were outside Ottoman control. Provided these rulers did not make concessions to Britain’s rivals, Britain’s concern was only that they should help to suppress piracy.

3. Muhammad Ali’s Egypt: Ottoman Rival
    The Napoleonic episode had minimal direct effect on Egypt; but, through the defeat of the Mamluke beys and the weakening of their hold on the country, it had important indirect influence. When the French departed, the